The present study explored the effects of explicit and systematic teaching of morphemic analysis on vocabulary learning and comprehension. The reading class taught by the researcher was purposely taught the most common (30) prefixes and the most common (30) roots. Following fourteen 50-minute lessons, students were tested on their ability to recall the meanings of words used to teach the morphemic analysis skills, to derive meanings for new words that contained taught morphemic elements, and to comprehend text containing new words. The results indicated that (a) there was an immediate and delayed effect of morphemic analysis for lesson words, and (b) there was evidence that a morphemic approach improved students' vocabulary and, consequently, their comprehension. The findings of this study provide support for the implementation of a morphemic approach for vocabulary instruction.

This paper is concerned with the process of language change whereby lexical items and constructions, in specific contexts, come to serve new grammatical functions. Emirati Arabic provides us with a wide range of grammaticalization phenomena. The aim of this paper is twofold: to shed light on the basic concepts relating to grammaticalization phenomena and to examine the grammaticalization of a number of constructions in Emirati Arabic, investigating their formation and the changes in their functions. The development of these grammatical constructions follows a grammaticalization pathway identified for a wide range of linguistic items cross-linguistically.

The formation of future markers from distinct lexical sources or from similar sources under specific circumstances follows universal pathways. It is standardly agreed that grammaticalization is a process which encompasses a range of changes which involve desemanticization (loss of meaning), decategorialization (loss of categorical features), generalization (use extended to new contexts), and phonetic reduction. The paper assumes that the b-prefix derives from two distinct lexical sources: volitional (encoding future) and prepositional (encoding indicative mood, progressive, and habitual aspect), and that the morphological overlap of these two prefixes is a mere coincidence. The paper will concentrate on the development of the future marker (b-prefix) from a verbal noun of volition in Syrian Arabic. The main goal is to explicate the nature of the grammaticalization paths of the b-future in Syrian Arabic based on synchronic data. The paper posits that the verbal noun of volition has undergone semantic, structural, and phonological changes.

The breakup of Old English to-infinitive: Causes and consequences The main goal of this paper is to account for the recategorisation of the Old English to-infinitive and the consequent rise of for before the Middle English to-infinitive. We argue that the loss of D feature has two consequences. The first consequence is that V?to-D movement was lost resulting in the break-up of the (morphological and) syntactic unity of the to-infinitive. The second consequence, a consequence of the first consequence, concerns the appearance of the so-called split infinitive, i.e. the development of a preverbal adverb, negation and object position. This crucial evidence marks the drift of the infinitive towards VP behaviour. Given that D was lost in early Middle English (i.e. 1150-1200) and the split infinitive appeared in the 13th century, the paper concludes that the change from a PP to a TP status was gradual and not simultaneous with other changes.

This paper seeks to explain and exemplify the relationship between grammaticalization and reanalysis, two important processes of grammatical change which occur in language. The ultimate goal of this paper is to prove that whilst the two are crucially related, they are not mutually dependent and can extensively occur alone. The paper focuses on the shift of for from the thematic function and/or case realizer to the modern pure complementizer status.